A History of Essex Farm
 Essex Farm, August 1937 |
This is a basic history of the property, located in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, from the time that the property was first patented by Lord Baltimore to Ferdinando Battee, Sr. in 1664 until the death in 2003 of John Lansdale, Jr., the last owner of the property in the family. The house burned down in Dec. 2008 due to arson. This history refers to branches of the Battee, Waters, Franklin, and Lansdale families. This is as yet very spare!
A History of Essex. (being revised)
These four .pdf files illustrate the descents of relevant family members: the Battees, the Franklins, the Waters, and the Lansdales.
Lansdale Family History
Miscellaneous Personal and Family Notes. This essay was written by John Lansdale, Sr. intermittently between 1929 and 1944. It includes in the latter sections his life until about 1909. Prior to this, however, he compiles much of what he knows of his family history. It refers to the Lansdale, Strain, Waters, Franklin, and other families. To make it accessible, the essay has has been annotated with footnotes, images, and an index of names and places keyed to people in the database. (being revised)
Grover Hinds, "Thomas Lansdale at Savage, Triadelphia, and Ellicot Mills," in The Legacy: Newsletter of the Howard County Historical Society 43.1 (Spring 2005): 6-7. This is a brief biography of Thomas Hyatt Lansdale. This is available from the Howard County Historical Society.
Triadelphia
Triadelphia was a small town on the Patuxent River near Sandy Spring in Montgomery County on the Howard County border. It was founded in 1809 by "three brothers" (that is, brothers-in-law) Caleb Bentley, Thomas Moore, and Isaac Briggs. Thomas Hyatt Lansdale was an early resident. He and his son, Thomas Franklin Lansdale, milled cotton there until the Civil War, and the Lansdales lived there until 1890 when they moved to Davidsonville in Anne Arundel County. The town was flooded in the mid-1940s to make a dam.
The Sandy Spring Museum includes documents and images of the Lansdale and related families from the nineteenth century. You can find Triadelphia among its online exhibits.
Unknown, The Personal Recollections of a Lost Village, written in 1911 and published in The Religious Telescope in Dayton, Ohio.
R. Bentley Thomas, The Story of Triadelphia, Maryland, written in 1943, though there is no indication of where it might have been published.
Alice Vedder Farquahar, Notes about the Triadelphia Bell, a brief note, with no date. The "Tom Lansdale" who signed the note at the bottom is (I believe) Thomas Franklin Lansdale, Jr., the son of the Tom Lansdale who is mentioned in the note.
Mary Charlotte Crook, "The Tale of Triadelphia, the Town Beneath the Lake," was published in The Montgomery County Story 33.3 (August, 1990): 117-128, is freely available from Montgomery History. Also see the essay above by Grover Hinds.